Cronenberg Beyond the Grave

A few thoughts on ‘The Shrouds’

It has been a big few weeks for Canada. Just before the Liberal Party returned to power in Ottawa under the globalist technocrat Mark Carney on the basis of an improbable revival of Canadian nationalism, one of the country’s greatest living artists has bequeathed us another great work. I refer to the general release of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which along with Crimes of the Future (2022) signals a late-career return to the body-horror genre he single-handedly defined in the final decades of the 20th century.

In my review of Crimes of the Future, I made the case for why Cronenberg is the true prophet of our technological age:

Cronenberg’s insight has always been that the advancement of technology also entails the transformation of the body as opposed to its transcendence, as pop transhumanism tends to imagine in both utopian and dystopian versions. Compare The Matrix, where bodies are suspended inertly as minds are immersed in a dreamworld, with Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, also released in 1999, where even as counterfeit realities proliferate, the body remains a visceral presence, penetrated with “bio-ports” that hook up to devices resembling new organs.

It was Cronenberg, and not the Wachowskis, who foresaw the true form of our emerging cyborg reality. Far from being relegated to the background, the body is the site of struggles over technologies that remake it from within, from mRNA vaccines to puberty blockers. As if in tacit acknowledgement of this, a fashionable interpretation of The Matrix casts it as allegory of its creators’ gender transitions. What seemed to viewers of the film to be a purely mental reawakening turns out to have been a metaphor for ever more widespread practices of body modification.

In The Shrouds, the director takes this vision beyond—or rather, straight into—the grave. Many of his protagonists have been what we might now call biotech entrepreneurs, and The Shrouds’s Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is no exception. The concept behind his startup, “Gravetech,” harks back to the high gothic era of the 19th century, when the widespread fear of premature burial led to the invention of coffins with acoustic tubes that enabled communication with the world above should it become necessary.

Karsh’s driving concern is, if anything, more morbid than his Victorian predecessors’. Grieving the premature death of his wife from cancer, he has invented a technology that allows him to keep remote watch over her decomposing corpse through a sophisticated imaging apparatus that envelops her remains, and is now doing a brisk business selling it to others. The graves installed by Gravtech include a digital screen on which detailed scans of the body of the deceased, not unlike a uterine ultrasound, are broadcast. Karsh’s erotic fixation on his wife’s body, not too far removed from necrophilia, also attunes him to its continuing bodily transformation. Toward the beginning of the film he notices that her bones—wracked by metastatic cancer before her death—are sprouting inexplicable growths, a mystery he sets out to resolve.

Crimes of the Future, whose protagonists performed surgery as an artistic spectacle, concerned the expansion of the aesthetic gaze into the inner recesses of the living body The Shrouds imagines that the intrusion of digital surveillance even into the realm of death and bodily decay. Picking up on the paranoid themes of classics like Videodrome and Scanners, Cronenberg shows that this enterprise has unsurprisingly garnered interest from the highest echelons of power. Global intrigue ensues, featuring Chinese investors, Russian hackers, Icelandic environmentalists, and Hungarian industrialists as well as Karsh’s addled hacker brother-in-law (Guy Pearce).

In one of Cronenberg’s earliest films, Shivers (1975), a mad scientist creates a parasite that, once it has entered the body, becomes a new organ that eliminates all sexual inhibitions, turning its victims into sex-crazed zombies who are quickly consumed by their unrestrained lust. In The Shrouds, the coincidence of Eros and Thanatos is taken in the other direction, finding eroticism in the meditation on corpses and decomposition. The tone is more somber than the director’s earlier work, but the result is if anything more disturbing.

This week in Compact

• Audrey Pollnow on why New York must reject “assisted dying”

• James O’Reilly tells the story of a survivor of the Lebanese Civil War

• Emmett Penney on the blackout in Spain

• Leila Mechoui and Philip Cunliffe on the Canadian election

• Hamilton Craig on the new War on Terror

• Branko Marcetic on the lessons of the Green New Deal for Trump

• Djene Bajalan on the new Syrian regime

• Valerie Stivers on the limits of “rebellion literature”

• Evelyn Quartz on the limits of “pro-democracy” politics

Thanks for reading!